Being is the indeterminate immediate

Highlighted text is Lenin’s underlining. The ® access his annotations.

Section One: Determinateness (Quality)

¹³⁰ Being is the indeterminate immediate.

It is free from determinateness in relation to essence and also from any which it can possess within itself.

This reflectionless being is being as it is immediately in its own self alone.

¹³¹ Because it is indeterminate being, it lacks all quality.

But in itself, the character of indeterminateness attaches to it only in contrast to what is determinate or qualitative.

But determinate being stands in contrast to being in general, so that the very indeterminateness of the latter constitutes its quality.

Thus the first being is in itself determinate.

It passes over into determinate being as a finite being that sublates itself and passes over into the infinite relation of being to its own self.

This turns it itno being-for-self.

¹³² What is pure being without any further determination?

In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself.

It is also not unequal relatively to an other; it has no diversity within itself nor any with a reference outwards.

It would not be held fast in its purity if it contained any determination or content which could be distinguished in it or by which it could be distinguished from an other.

It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness.

There is nothing to be intuited in it, if one can speak here of intuiting; or, it is only this pure intuiting itself.

Just as little is anything to be thought in it, or it is equally only this empty thinking. Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing.

¹³³ What is pure nothing?

It is simply equality with itself, complete emptiness, absence of all determination and content — undifferentiatedness in itself.

In so far as intuiting or thinking can be mentioned here, it counts as a distinction whether something or nothing is intuited or thought.

To intuit or think nothing has, therefore, a meaning.

Both are distinguished and thus [the idea of] nothing exists in our thinking.

[The idea of] nothing is empty intuition and thought itself. It is the same empty thought as pure being.

Nothing is, therefore, the same determination, or rather absence of determination, and thus altogether the same as, pure being.®*

C Becoming

1. Unity of Being and Nothing

¹³⁴ Pure Being [Existence] and pure nothing are, therefore, the same.

What is the truth is neither being nor nothing, but that being — does not pass over but has passed over — into nothing, and nothing into being.

But it is equally true that they are not undistinguished from each other, that, on the contrary, they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct, and yet that they are unseparated and inseparable and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite.

Their truth is therefore, this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: becoming, a movement in which both are distinguished, but by a difference which has equally immediately resolved itself. ®

Remark 1: The Opposition of Being and Nothing in Ordinary Thinking

¹³⁵ Nothing is usually opposed to something.

But the being of something is already determinate and is distinguished from another something.

And so therefore the nothing which is opposed to the something is also the nothing of a particular something, a determinate nothing. Here, however, nothing is to be taken in its indeterminate simplicity.

Should it be held more correct to oppose to being, non-being instead of nothing, there would be no objection to this so far as the result is concerned, for in non-being the relation to being is contained: both being and its negation are enunciated in a single term, nothing, as it is in becoming. But we are concerned first of all not with the form of opposition (with the form, that is, also of relation) but with the abstract, immediate negation: nothing, purely on its own account, negation devoid of any relations — what could also be expressed if one so wished merely by ’not'.